China's Ant Group doubles down on global expansion with cross-border payments offering Alipay+

Chinese fintech major Ant Group is looking to boost its global presence via its digital offering, Alipay+, as it seeks to connect mobile payment apps around the world.

"What we found is that people want to use their home e-wallets when they travel abroad. So they don't want to have to load their card into another app that they don't know as well," Douglas Feagin, senior vice president of Ant Group, an affiliate of Chinese tech giant Alibaba, told CNBC.

The group's global arm, Ant International, introduced Alipay+ in 2020, allowing foreigners to use apps from their home countries to make payments in China by scanning QR codes of Alipay – Ant Group's largely domestically-focused platform – and in other countries via local partners.

"We see a huge opportunity for expansion and the relatively broad coverage we have in Asia – we [would] like to replicate in places like Middle East, Latam and Europe," said Feagin. "People from all these regions are going to other regions, so a big opportunity to expand."

Ant had invested in country-specific e-wallets across Asia, but the CEOs wanted to take their products overseas, said Feagin, also president of Ant International.

The company had some cross-border tourism business from customers traveling outside of China, said Feagin, but that was "mostly focused on where the Chinese tourists go." Ant had entered Europe and the U.S., where Chinese tourism was booming before the Covid-19 pandemic, through Alipay.

Ant with its Alipay+ offering seeks to make the most of the early inroads into those markets.

"We had the benefit that Alipay was already accepted in many merchants around the world so one of our first steps was [to] convert those merchants to Alipay+ merchants. So instead of just accepting